To stimulate these connections, writers intimate their attitudes and feelings with useful devices, such as sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and formal or informal language. Many species of plants and animals are disappearing right before our eyes. Human activities, including pollution, deforestation, hunting, and overpopulation, are devastating the natural environment.
Without our help, many species will not survive long enough for our children to see them in the wild. Take the tiger, for example. Today, tigers occupy just 7 percent of their historical range, and many local populations are already extinct. Hunted for their beautiful pelt and other body parts, the tiger population has plummeted from one hundred thousand in to just a few thousand.
Contact your local wildlife conservation society today to find out how you can stop this terrible destruction. Content refers to all the written substance in a document. After selecting an audience and a purpose, you must choose what information will make it to the page.
Content may consist of examples, statistics, facts, anecdotes, testimonies, and observations, but no matter the type, the information must be appropriate and interesting for the audience and purpose. An essay written for third graders that summarizes the legislative process, for example, would have to contain succinct and simple content. Content is also shaped by tone. When the tone matches the content, the audience will be more engaged, and you will build a stronger relationship with your readers.
Consider that audience of third graders. You would choose simple content that the audience will easily understand, and you would express that content through an enthusiastic tone. The same considerations apply to all audiences and purposes. Read the following paragraphs about four films and then identify the purpose of each paragraph.
Consider the essay most recently assigned to you. Identify the most effective academic purpose for the assignment. On your own sheet of paper, generate a list of characteristics under each category for each audience.
This list will help you later when you read about tone and content. Now think about your next writing assignment. Identify the purpose you may use the same purpose listed in 2 , and then identify the audience.
Create a list of characteristics under each category. Think about the assignment and purpose you selected in 2, and the audience you selected in 3. Now, identify the tone you would use in the assignment. Match the content in the box to the appropriate audience and purpose. On your own sheet of paper, write the correct letter next to the number.
Using the assignment, purpose, audience, and tone from Note 4, generate a list of content ideas. Remember that content consists of examples, statistics, facts, anecdotes, testimonies, and observations.
Skip to main content. Search for:. Identify audience, tone, and content. Apply purpose, audience, tone, and content to a specific assignment. Three elements shape the content of each paragraph: Purpose. The reason the writer composes the paragraph. The individual or group whom the writer intends to address. Identifying Common Academic Purposes The purpose for a piece of writing identifies the reason you write a particular document. Summary Paragraphs A summary shrinks a large amount of information into only the essentials.
Analysis Paragraphs An analysis separates complex materials in their different parts and studies how the parts relate to one another. Synthesis Paragraphs A synthesis combines two or more items to create an entirely new item. Evaluation Paragraphs An evaluation judges the value of something and determines its worth. Tip When reviewing directions for assignments, look for the verbs summarize , analyze , synthesize , or evaluate.
Writing at Work Thinking about the purpose of writing a report in the workplace can help focus and structure the document. Identifying the Audience Imagine you must give a presentation to a group of executives in an office. Example A Last Saturday, I volunteered at a local hospital. Example B OMG! Tip While giving a speech, you may articulate an inspiring or critical message, but if you left your hair a mess and laced up mismatched shoes, your audience would not take you seriously.
These measure important data about a group of people, such as their age range, their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, or their gender. Certain topics and assignments will require these kinds of considerations about your audience. For other topics and assignments, these measurements may not influence your writing in the end.
Regardless, it is important to consider demographics when you begin to think about your purpose for writing. If audience members have earned a doctorate degree, for example, you may need to elevate your style and use more formal language. Or, if audience members are still in college, you could write in a more relaxed style. Prior knowledge.
This refers to what the audience already knows about your topic. If your readers have studied certain topics, they may already know some terms and concepts related to the topic. Although you cannot peer inside the brains of your readers to discover their knowledge, you can make reasonable assumptions. For instance, a nursing major would presumably know more about health-related topics than a business major would. These indicate what readers will look for while reading your assignment.
Choosing Appropriate, Interesting Content Content refers to all the written substance in a document. Key Takeaways Paragraphs separate ideas into logical, manageable chunks of information. The content of each paragraph and document is shaped by purpose, audience, and tone. The four common academic purposes are to summarize, to analyze, to synthesize, and to evaluate.
Devices such as sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and formal or informal language communicate tone and create a relationship between the writer and his or her audience. Content may consist of examples, statistics, facts, anecdotes, testimonies, and observations.
All content must be appropriate and interesting for the audience, purpose and tone. Exercises 1. This film could easily have been cut down to less than two hours. By the final scene, I noticed that most of my fellow moviegoers were snoozing in their seats and were barely paying attention to what was happening on screen.
Although the director sticks diligently to the book, he tries too hard to cram in all the action, which is just too ambitious for such a detail-oriented story.
If you want my advice, read the book and give the movie a miss. During the opening scene, we learn that the character Laura is adopted and that she has spent the past three years desperately trying to track down her real parents.
Having exhausted all the usual options—adoption agencies, online searches, family trees, and so on—she is on the verge of giving up when she meets a stranger on a bus. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.
This presentation is designed to introduce your students to a variety of factors that contribute to strong, well-organized writing. This presentation is suitable for the beginning of a composition course or the assignment of a writing project in any class.
Authors and audiences both have a wide range of purposes for communicating. The importance of purpose in rhetorical situations cannot be overstated. Examples and illustrations are a basic kind of evidence and support in expository and argumentative writing. In her essay about anorexia nervosa, student writer Nancie Brosseau uses several examples to develop a paragraph:.
Another problem, lying, occurred most often when my parents tried to force me to eat. Because I was at the gym until around eight o'clock every night, I told my mother not to save me dinner. I would come home and make a sandwich and feed it to my dog.
I lied to my parents every day about eating lunch at school. For example, I would bring a sack lunch and sell it to someone and use the money to buy diet pills. I always told my parents that I ate my own lunch. Classification is a form of analyzing a subject into types. Comparison and contrast can be used to organize an essay.
Consider whether either of the following two outlines would help you organize your comparison essay. Analysis is simply dividing some whole into its parts. A library has distinct parts: stacks, electronic catalog, reserve desk, government documents section, interlibrary loan desk, etc. If you are writing about a library, you may need to know all the parts that exist in that library. Look at your own topic. Would analysis of the parts help you understand and explain your subject? Although we usually think of description as visual, we may also use other senses--hearing, touch, feeling, smell-- in our attempt to describe something for our readers.
I awoke this morning with a sense of unexplainable anticipation gnawing away at the back of my mind, that this chilly, leaden day at Mesa Verde would bring something new. They are a haunting sight, these broken houses, clustered together down in the gloom of the canyon. The silence is broken only by the rush of the wind in the trees and the trickling of a tiny stream of melting snow springing from ledge to ledge. This small, abandoned village of tiny houses seems almost as the Indians left it, reduced by the passage of nearly a thousand years to piles of rubble through which protrude broken red adobe walls surrounding ghostly jet black openings, undisturbed by modern man.
Process analysis is analyzing the chronological steps in any operation. A recipe contains process analysis. First, sift the flour. Next, mix the eggs, milk, and oil. Then fold in the flour with the eggs, milk and oil. Then add baking soda, salt and spices. Finally, pour the pancake batter onto the griddle. Narration is possibly the most effective strategy essay writers can use.
Readers are quickly caught up in reading any story, no matter how short it is. Writers of exposition and argument should consider where a short narrative might enliven their essay. Typically, this narrative can relate some of your own experiences with the subject of your essay.
Where might a short narrative help you explain your subject? In cause and effect analysis, you map out possible causes and effects. All readers have expectations. They assume what they read will meet their expectations. As a writer, your job is to make sure those expectations are met, while at the same time, fulfilling the purpose of your writing. Once you have determined what type of purpose best conveys your motivations, you will then need to examine how this will affect your readers.
Perhaps you are explaining your topic when you really should be convincing readers to see your point. Writers and readers may approach a topic with conflicting purposes. Your job, as a writer, is to make sure both are being met.
Often your audience will help you determine your purpose. The beliefs they hold will tell you whether or not they agree with what you have to say. Suppose, for example, you are writing to persuade readers against Internet censorship. Your purpose will differ depending on the audience who will read your writing. If your audience is computer users who surf the net daily, you could appear foolish trying to persuade them to react against Internet censorship.
It's likely they are already against such a movement. Instead, they might expect more information on the topic. If your audience is parents who don't want their small children surfing the net, you'll need to convince them that censorship is not the solution to the problem.
You should persuade this audience to consider other options. Your focus otherwise known as thesis, claim, main idea, or problem statement is a reflection of your purpose. If these two do not agree, you will not accomplish what you set out to do. Consider the following examples below:. Suppose your purpose is to inform readers about relationships between Type A personalities and heart attacks.
Your focus could then be: Type A personalities do not have an abnormally high risk of suffering heart attacks. Suppose your purpose is to persuade readers not to quarantine AIDS victims. Your focus could then be: Children afflicted with AIDS should not be prevented from attending school. Kate Kiefer, English Department Readers and writers both have goals when they engage in reading and writing. Writers typically define their goals in several categories-to inform, persuade, entertain, explore.
When writers and readers have mutually fulfilling goals-to inform and to look for information-then writing and reading are most efficient. At times, these goals overlap one another. Many readers of science essays are looking for science information when they often get science philosophy.
This mismatch of goals tends to leave readers frustrated, and if they communicate that frustration to the writer, then the writer feels misunderstood or unsuccessful. Donna Lecourt, English Department Whatever reality you are writing within, whatever you chose to write about, implies a certain audience as well as your purpose for writing.
You decide you have something to write about, or something you care about, then purpose determines audience. Steve Reid, English Department A general definition of purpose relates to motivation. For instance, "I'm angry, and that's why I'm writing this.
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